The next time you're looking for an apartment or rental home, give Lovely a shot. The service pulls in apartment listings from all over the web (including Craigslist, which Padmapper, our current favorite, no longer supports, no thanks to Craigslist) and organizes them so you can easily see how many rentals are in a given neighborhood or city, search for specific amenities or prices, and then get in touch with the landlord.

Lovely works a lot like some of the other Google-maps based services that do the same thing, but where Lovely shines is in how well designed the whole service is. Before you zoom in on a map, you can see how many listings are in an area with a simple number, so you don't have to count push-pins, and neighborhoods are broken up into zones so you can see whether a rental falls in the area you want to live. You can see the age of a given apartment listing and how fresh it is right from the map view, so you don't waste time looking at old listings. Of course, you can search for listings within a given price range and with certain amenities, and you can get email alerts for any new listings that match your criteria.

Click on any listing to see a pop-up version of the listing, complete with detailed information and photos. You can also view the full listing, which takes you to a custom page with all of the relevant information about the listing laid out in an easy to digest format, along with options to contact the landlord. Lovely is available in several major metro areas in the US, including Seattle, San Francisco, Washington DC, Boston, and more. If your city isn't represented yet, check back—it's likely coming soon.

How Lovely is getting around the same issues with Craigslist that are currently plaguingPadMapper, one of our favorite apartment search tools, is anyone's guess. Even so, Craigslist listings are available at Lovely, even though you won't be able to email Craigslist posters directly from Lovely (you'll have to copy/paste.) Give it a shot and let us know what you think, and whether you think it can stand up to the competition.